Rewriting the Scribbling Women

Abstract

Rewriting the Scribbling Women Nina Baym The new woman's movement in the United States developed around 1960, chiefly in reaction to society's massive attempt, after the end of World War II, to reverse the century-old movement towards sexual equality and social justice for women. Why society should have tried to do this, and just who "society" consists of here, are questions whose answers are far from clear. It is clear, however, that elite males were active in the project, and that among elite males, literary intellectuals were eager to help. Their particular cultural work consisted in articulating a rationale for the traditional view of woman's place, appealing both to the "natural order" of things and to the testimony of "great" works of the human imagination. They denigrated women's intellectual and imaginative abilities and obliterated or misrepresented women's contributions to culture and history. A perhaps trivial instance of this activity, which can nevertheless stand for countless others, is the treatment of Henry James's Bostonians by both Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. Their introductions to paperback editions of this novel assumed that each and every woman's natural destiny was to serve as sexual playmate and helpmeet for a particular man.1 They both saw the physician Mary Prance as the most morally objectionable character in the entire novel. Howe, milder than Trilling, calls her one who has "denied her life as a woman," James's "warning" of what feminism would become if taken to an extreme.2 By "life" he means frequent, although monogamous, genital heterosexual activity. Actually, Dr. Prance is not a feminist, and cares only to be the best doctor possible; Howe ignores this as well as the fact that James makes her a good doctor and a contented human being. Howe does not respect the character's commitment to a worthy profession (as he surely would were she a man); indeed, the [End Page 137] practice of it, we must assume, is what has kept her (in his view) unfulfilled "as a woman." If the woman student reading this introduction of The Bostonians concludes that the character is intended by James as a warning against becoming a physician, she would be wrong; Howe is using the character for this purpose, which is his own. That the guardians of culture felt free to use "literary analysis" as a front for cultural indoctrination requires us to distrust the record they have made. Therefore, when we learned in school that women had not produced literature (learned it by never reading anything written by women), it was not enough to conclude that this silence was real and explain it as the result of suppression. Had we not all, after all, grown up on Little Women and Gone with the Wind? And didn't every specialist in American literature, even those who weren't writing on Nathaniel Hawthorne, know his reference to a "damned mob of scribbling women"? If Hawthorne was not hallucinating, there had once been enough women writers to constitute a mob. Nor was their work unknown; they were widely published and immensely popular. But—was it literature? When forced to the wall, our machismo hommes de lettres always have that rhetorical question ready. The fact that so many of the women writers of the nineteenth century (and the twentieth) were popular authors functioned rather to support an exclusionary tactic than to put it in question, for canons are composed of rare objects, and the popular by definition is not rare. The very success of large numbers of women authors could be read as a sign of the literary inferiority of their product, testimony to the triumph of vulgarity and commercial values over those of high art. The enterprise of "major" literature could thus be made into an undertaking reserved for the stalwart male intellect. To rescue the neglected men and elevate them to their rightful position of superiority to the women: that became a major cultural aim of the literary critic in the years following World War I, and even more in the years following World War II. One took women writers seriously by treating them as serious obstacles to the creation of...